that it signifies more than anything else that the battle is already lost, that the invocation of Lenin is in the face of the failure of the Leninist party to fulfill its promise. It is this utopian theme of hope that in fact allows Rivera's painting to function today as the prototype for an entire genre of contemporary mural painting. In black and Latin neighbourhoods, often the neglected quarters of North American cities, there is a, if not flourishing, certainly persistent school of painting known as the community murals movement. The artists who make these pictures often consciously link themselves to the Mexican tradition. If, in 1933, a spectre was haunting Rockefeller Center, now the ghost of Rivera's mural haunts the abandoned or undeveloped sections of the city. Needless to say the affirmative utopianism of these works is in direct proportion to the desperation of the communities they speak to and for. Yet they have to be acknowledged as images of hope belonging to the dispossessed of capitalism. Not only the crudeness of these community murals, but above all the heavy handed and tendentious nature of their affirmations, a strong link to the tradition of Rivera, mark them as a genuinely popular art, quite apart from the slick productions of the culture industry. Though many of these murals, in Chicano districts especially, have agrarian motifs that hark back to peasant communities of origin, they also often contain naive memories of an earlier faith in the transformative power of technology (Fig. 14). The patrons of Rockefeller Center could not have known what appears clear to us now with hindsight, that the best way to neutralize the socialist and utopian features of the mural was to leave it where it was. The destruction of the mural allows its image of technical progress bonded to social change to appear as a suppressed utopian alternative rather than a rather quaintly naive and earnest phase in a new streamlined history of corporate science. Further, the Garden of Eden motif in the lower register of Rivera's mural shows us that universalist technological utopian fantasies at their origin are interTHE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 17:2 1994 60 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 04:15:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Fig. 14. Cityarts Workshop mural, 'Seeds for Progressive Change' 1975, New York City. Courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New rork. woven throughout with motifs from premoder agricultural world views. There is perhaps even justification for asserting that such fantasies are generated by over-rapid modernization of agricultural societies. Michael Taussig's observations on this matter are so interesting they deserve quotation: Societies on the threshold of capitalist development necessarily interpet that development in terms of precapitalist beliefs and practices.... In short, the meaning of capitalism will be subject to precapitalist meanings, and the conflict expressed in such a confrontation will be one in which man is seen as the aim of production, and not production as the aim of man. Although the insights that are intrinsic to such a reaction seem inevitably to pass away with time and the progressive institutionalization of capitalist structures and common sense eventually accepts the new conditions as natural ones, certain bodies of thought, as well as enormous social movements, have kept them alive and functioning as a critical world force. Marxism and Marxist revolutionary movements in the moder era represent the 'rationalization' of the early precapitalist outrage at the expansion of the capitalist system.62 In this view, Marxism itself could be seen as an ultramoder critique of modernity from the position of the losers, the victims of the modernization process. Here the concept of history as a dialectic, when expressed in images, takes on strong aspects of a fantasized return to an idealized premodern past. In the writings of Wells and many others, the future can only be imagined as a return to innocence, to the garden, and traces of the same vision can be found in Rivera's cosmic dialectics; the peace and justice which has been forever lost can only exist now in the very farthest future of the imagination, the more so as there is no immediate prospect of their return. But this history should also discourage us from romantically and one-sidedly equating difference within modernity with resistance to a so-called dominant culture. The utopian energies of the developing world have played an active role in the production of modernity, a modernity that yet carries the memory, as it carries the scars, of the social struggles out of which it was born.